Cobb County, Ga., Laptop Plan to Be Probed by Grand Jury

A special grand jury will look into a laptop-computer program that had been planned for the Cobb County, Ga., schools.

Cobb County District Attorney Pat Head, who conducted an investigation into the program, asked for the grand jury, according to a spokeswoman for his office. The local newspaper reported that a focus of the criminal probe would be whether the procurement contract for the $100 million program was manipulated in favor of Apple Computer.

The district was to buy 17,000 iBook G4s this fall for teachers and students at four high schools that were to serve as demonstration sites, according to the company’s Web site. The initiative, called Power to Learn, eventually would have involved 63,000 of the computers.

But a superior-court judge this past summer ordered the 102,000-student district to suspend the program, after finding that officials did not explain fully to county taxpayers how money from a sales-tax referendum would be spent on the laptops. The school board voted to terminate the contract in August.